This argument/counterargument is pretty eye-opening to me. Kudos to both Animast and g5095 for the discussion. I work in a completely different domain than gaming, but there is no question that this strikes the nerve of a universal challenge that we have continued face as humans seeking to better understand the very fabric of nature and civilization itself.
Please don't take offence, but g5095's stance is akin to early US federalists advocating for strong centralized governance, whereas Animats stance is akin to US democtratic-republican values of distributed governance.[1]
If you think about Animast's point, that "regions run 24/7 regardless of whether any user [citizen] is in [consciously using] them. Trains continue to run, crops continue to grow, grazing animals graze...", and the the discrete energy cost of operating those regions - is this not the very challenge that all governments face in the "real world"?
With the maturation of the 'Metaverse', in which all functions of nature are boiled down to the discrete (countable) energy packets needed to transfer information, are we not seeing the struggle between centralized vs. distributed government play out in virtual space? If so, can we leverage the Metaverse as a proxy for nature, generally, to find the mathematical ideal balance between these two competing forces of democratic civilization? The result, I would presume, being some difinitive proportion - the measurable distribution and magnitude of 'control' energy with respect to the distribution and magnitude of total energy of a predominantly nonstochastic system (society).
It seems like there is a nexus here between control theory, information theory, thermodynamics, and indeed, sociology, that can be studied using the Metaverse to arrive at a more balanced societal framework. There is a truth here begging to be understood.
1. https://www.ushistory.org/Us/19c.asp